Smithy

That looks delicious, FauxPas! Very summery and simple.

My most recent attempt seemed like a good idea at the time. We had a package of smoked pork tenderloin from our most recent visit to Llano, Texas. I've been saving it for a special occasion. The Beer Cook-off seemed like just such an occasion. A smoked pork tenderloin sounded too strong to stand up to the delicate fruity flavors of the apricot wheat beer I last used. It needed something more muscular. Moose Drool Brown Ale is a heavy, dark, slightly sweet - malty? - brown ale from the Big Sky Brewery in Missoula, Montana. It doesn't quite taste like stout, but it has that sort of body, with a hint of chocolate at the finish. I thought it might compliment smoked meat nicely. The elements of the dish: chopped onions, diced potatoes, butter and oil for a slight browning, and the beer as the deglazing and cooking liquid. The tenderloin was already fully cooked, so it needed no more heat than enough to warm and brown. Meanwhile, I'd set up sourdough loaves using a starter inoculated with the apricot wheat beer. They look good, don't they? The practiced eye can probably tell that they were overrisen before baking. The slices looked like biscotti. The flavor was good, but I couldn't detect any apricot. That's what I get for not studying up on beer-batter loaves. Dinner: It doesn't look bad. It didn't taste bad. It just didn't give any hint of beer in the meal. The smoked pork tenderloin sounded delicate to us, but once out of its package it asserted its smoky porky salty nature like tartan at a ballroom dance. The muscular beer quite failed to assert itself. This leads me to wonder: what beer is a good compliment to ham? I don't think the smoke is the issue; I think curing salts overwhelm the rest.

Sawdust?? Well, that would qualify as gluten-free and high fiber. As for the other: think of it as realizing just what a wide world is out there, ready to explore! With luck, the learning goes for a lifetime. Is there a baker alive who thinks s/he knows it all? That person is probably insufferable. The masters move on to teach the rest of us, but I'll bet they keep stretching to see what's just over the horizon.

My bread is getting better. I was quite proud of these: Lean straight white batard; Mick's country sourdough boule. My dinner guests were as pleased as I. Then last night, I turned out these: A tad overrisen before they went into the oven. The flavor's good, but they're best sliced lengthwise lest the slices be mistaken for biscotti. Too bad I don't have the fixings handy to make muffaletta sandwiches.

This weekend I visited an estate sale nearby. The day was the fine, sunny spring day we enjoy up here with leaves rustling and apples blossoming, and the cheery weather carried over to the gang waiting in line. The house is a beautifully kept log home with golden varnished wood inside and out. The basement area was clean and open, and had probably been the woman's canning area, judging by the sinks and roasters and jars packed among small appliances, books and tables' worth of old kitchen tools. I spotted my favorite style of lemon squeezer - only $5 on the first day! I thought about taking it. I resisted: I have two already (this photo is of one of mine) and have given others to all my friends who would appreciate one. I didn't need another. Maybe it would find a good home with someone who needed it. Up the tight wooden spiral staircase I went to the main living area. The kitchen had cabinets with tin panels in the golden wood frames, an old-fashioned compressor-on-top refrigerator (running) and a heavy enameled cast iron multi-chamber stove designed for propane. The dining room had a generous table; the living room looked comfortable with a stone fireplace going up through the middle of the house as is proper. The place had a wide variety of dishes, glassware, table linens, musical instruments, games, crocks (the original point of my visit), artwork, furniture - all displayed in a comfortable array. As I wandered I got the strong sense that this woman had loved to cook and to entertain, and she'd loved her family and friends. The place had the feel of a life very well lived. I mentioned it to another woman who was perusing at more or less the same pace as I (we'd been discussing crocks earlier) and she agreed. Then a young woman who was looking through the cookbooks turned to me. "I didn't mean to eavesdrop," she said, "but it's so nice to hear you say that! This house was my grandmother's, and you've described her exactly." We chatted for a bit about the warm feeling of the home, and I learned that the granddaughter was looking for books with her grandmother's handwritten notes. Back down the stairs I went, to check out a pressure cooker I'd seen before. "We're interested in the same things," said the first woman I'd been talking to. She didn't want the pressure cooker, so I claimed it. Then I had an idea. "Do you like to cook from scratch? Do you use lemons and limes in your cooking?" I asked. She did. I pointed to the lemon squeezer. "Do you know what that is?" She didn't. I told her. She was impressed. That squeezer has a new home now, and I hope it will be well-loved and -used. I came away with a 2-gallon Redwing crock in excellent condition (at a good price, relatively speaking) and these: The deep fryer ($16) was new in the box, never opened, and will be tested sometime this week. The pressure cooker was in excellent condition, all parts intact, $5. I used it last night. I am a sucker for vintage fabrics. These didn't cost much, and when I use them I'll think of this woman I never met who gave such a warm spirit to her home. The two upper right books are locally-produced books from the Lutheran Church ladies. Experience suggests that I'll never cook from them, but they're local history and I half expect to find names I recognize. The "General Foods Cooking School of the Air" book seems to be a companion piece to a radio cooking show from long ago, hosted by one Frances Lee Barton. The other two books speak for themselves. The Sunset book has already been put to good use.

I was joking about the control and assimilation bit. I agree with you that a life so driven toward that 'work' is out of balance. It sounds dreary to me, but I've known other people who loved their work to the exclusion of all else. I've also known people who considered food to be mere fuel. I've rarely eaten with them.

These are the people developing our future communications. Can control and assimilation be far behind? Gah.

Welcome! You opened a lot of avenues of inquiry here. Do you have specific plans for "the food industry" yet? For instance: are you about to start culinary school, or have you landed your first job in a restaurant (what kind of food, what position?) or are you going to work for the Ministry of Agriculture as a meat inspector, or...well, you get the idea. Next, what do you think of as Scottish food vs. exotic? What sort of food do you like to cook and eat? I see you've made a foray into the world of charcuterie already. Excellent!

The salad looks beautiful. I've had that sort of vinaigrette before, with the boiled-egg yolks. About half the time it seemed really to hold together as an emulsified blend (using my whisk) and the rest of the time it was delicious anyway. I haven't tried it since I got an immersion blender; maybe I'll (heh) give that a whirl.

I would feel betrayed if I ordered a meat pizza and found kernels of corn on it. I wonder what a windmill has to do with Mom's cooking?

I'm with kayb about the charcuterie. The lettuce heads are amazing, too. What a lovely abundance spring is bringing!

That looks outstanding, David! I picked up a deep fryer at an estate sale this weekend. I think I'll have to try onion rings soon, using your tips. I have a bagful of fresh Vidalia onions. They're also quite sweet. Aside from regional pride, do you think the Walla Walla onions are significantly different from other sweet onion varieties? I refreshed my sourdough starter today in two ways: the classic way (equal weights of flour, water and starter) and substituting the apricot wheat ale noted earlier for the water. As I write this, both starters are looking quite lively. I plan to bake tomorrow using the beer-refreshed starter, and see whether the flavor comes through.

I'm sorry for the family emergency. Your links look great, so I hope you'll be posting a live update later.

Wow, that looks like a lot of fun! I'd go staggering out of there with impulse buys and crockery and dishes, and then when I got home I'd be saying, "now, what do I do with all this?" Thanks for the tour.

The dish is a new idea to me, but I wonder whether following the general procedure for smashed potatoes / crash potatoes (what an excellent, simple dish!) would do the trick? Roast, then squash individually (with a potato masher, bottle, whatever) to relatively flat; drizzle with butter, oil, whatever (balsamic vinegar on the beets?) then a few minutes under the broiler. Does that sound like it might work?

What sorts of foods do you especially like? Do you do a lot of cooking for yourself?

That sounds like a good idea, Shel_B. Let us know how it works out, please.

Lovely meals, everyone. liuzhou, I love cilantro. I'll be giving something like that a try. Norm, I'm glad you were goaded into doing brisket. :-) It looks darned good, and I can enjoy the vicarious calories while we work to recover our waistlines from last month's excesses of Texas brisket. Okanagancook, did you coat the eggplant in anything (oil, broth) before baking? Shelby, you have my sympathy! Especially with a hit close to the house. About that hollandaise: could it be that the butter separates more in the microwave because you don't stir it as often as when you melt it on stovetop? I suspect that a separated butter might work against a proper emulsion in the hollandaise.

Some of the old-timer homes around here have the precursor to that: a floorboard that lifts up to reveal a crumb trap. Sweep everything into that, and then whisk or vacuum it out. None of my houses ever had it, but I envied it almost as much as the laundry chute from the kitchen to the basement. What a way to drop off the dirty table linens in a hurry.

So am I! I'm also envious of a genuine exhaust hood which, I assume, vents to the outside. Lovely!

That looks like a lot of delicious fun, and very educational. Curls, was the powdered confection 3 photos up in your last post a version of Turkish Delight?

The additional information about the pizza dough is valuable to this novice baker, so I thank Anna N and David Ross both. Last night, with snow(!) drifting lazily from the skies, I warmed the kitchen with bratwurst braised in apricot wheat beer from a local brewery. This beer has an apricot aroma and flavor that is noticeable but not as in-your-face as the citrus found in some hefewiezens. The bratwursts came from a local meat market. I browned the brats, then deglazed the pan with the apricot wheat beer and clapped a lid on the pan to finish the brats. Once they were done, I boiled the sauce down to a nice brown-honey syrup perfect to drizzle over the brats...and right on down, in an eyeblink, to a dark hard streak on the bottom of the pan. What I could scrape up tasted good: sweet, beery, caramely and sausagey together. It tasted great globbed onto the sausage. The golden misty beer and the golden browned bratwursts complimented each other nicely, with a subtle hint of fruit: enough to augment the food, not enough to shout "Hey! There's fruit in the bratwurst!" I was too busy trying to save the sauce to get photos, but now that I've tested this beer and method there will be better opportunities.

I'm baking bread today for a dinner party tomorrow: one batch of pate fermentee bread and one sourdough loaf. I can't do them tomorrow because of errands during the critical time. My present plan is to bake them fully and then simply rewarm tomorrow, but I wonder about the "take and bake" loaves I used to buy at our grocery stores. They were essentially done but a session in the oven (375F for 15? minutes) crisped and browned them. If I were to do that, how should I change today's baking? Should I change the temperature? At what stage should I remove the bread from the oven today? The advantage, I think, would be a crisper crust than if I bake them fully today, store them overnight and rewarm them.

Dejah, you have the snow now, we're getting it tomorrow. Meanwhile, today between thunderstorms I realized that it's GREEN and it suddenly (truly, within a day) smells like our northern spring. I don't know what plant(s) make that smell (newly-leafing alder? willow?), but it's distinctive - and magical. The ramps are up in our woods, and the markets have good asparagus. I scored some scallops (marked down for quick sale) this weekend. Dinner was seared scallops with asparagus, ramps, and prosciutto with caper butter, over rice. Bread from today's baking exercise, warm from the oven.

Great photos, and it looks like a lot of fun! A question on The Four Sisters' food: is "shaky beef" a commentary on its quality, or a specified dish? If the latter, what does it mean?